This effect is most pronounced when the person talking needs to explain the relevance of the subject. One of the greatest strengths of “Planet Money” is that the show’s staff is learning along with the rest of us. They’re able to explain in layman’s terms why news is important because they’re laymen themselves.

You’ll notice that “Marketplace” doesn’t take this tack. They assume you already know why almost any story having to do with money is important – money, after all, makes the world go round.

That’s great for people who already know a lot about money, just as the “Writer’s Almanac” is great for people who already care about literature, but neither program does a damn thing to explain why their subject is important, let alone bring you up to speed if you’re coming around.

Normally, Brooke, Bob, and everyone on the “On the Media” staff does a remarkable job of clueing the listener in on why their stories are interesting and relevant. Which means I need to expand a little bit on something I said last night.

I said both “the story tends to drone on into one of Bob’s favorite topics” and “Brooke, too, falters a little bit (to my ears) when talking about one of her favorite topics.”

Sadly, when they get to report on stories that they’re passionate about the result is lackluster – though their enthusiasm shines through, their real strength lies in getting us to care. When the host already cares passionately about their subject, it’s easy to forget that the audience doesn’t automatically agree.

I know that I’m not innocent of this. I like serious poetry, and I care deeply about the craft and literary criticism. But if I start talking about it to Kerry without illustrating why it’s important to the conversation, I’m met with either a blank stare or the sentence “stop being pretentious.”

Nevermind that pretentiousness implies to me a sense of forced superiority, not the excited feeling of “hey, I really like talking about this, let’s talk about this, come on, let’s go!”

Public radio – when you get past the smooth and smarmy voices – is full of people like me, who are curious and eager to just explore the world, figure out how it fits together, and to learn why that’s important. And it’s at its best when it’s slightly out of its area of expertise.

Muncie was a city built on the manufacturing industry, and it was spared somewhat from the Great Depression, owing largely to the Ball brothers and their famous jars. However, in the last decade to decade and a half, manufacturing has packed up and moved out of town.

East Central Indiana’s standby auto factories have been gone longer than I’ve been able to drive. The city is not weathering this economic downturn nearly as well as it did the Depression.

"downtown" by the Spacebase on Flickr.

And frankly, that’s as far as I want to prepare you for “Hard Times in Middletown,” a special about Muncie produced by Marketplace and American RadioWorks.

It’s a great short series about the town – focusing almost entirely on people outside of the Ball State University bubble, and it’s a sharp contrast. Spending my life on or nearby campus, I saw economic struggles, but it was always the economic struggle of the college student needing to decide between another beer or a burrito.

The people they focus on are actual community members, and you get the sense, through the production, that the audio was recorded in the forced closeness of a Muncie winter.

My only complaint about “Hard Times in Middletown” is the same one that you can guess Kerry would have – Kai Ryssdal. It just seems that, when he visited Muncie, Ryssdal would have been less likely to hang out and drink with townies – the subject of the special – at the Heorot, the Fickle Peach, or the Thirsty Turtle, and more likely to pal around over Cosmopolitans with his fellow big foreheaded, hair slicked back, finger-gun-rights activist Miles at the douchebaggy, if tasty and reasonably priced martini bar just off campus.

Granted, Bob didn’t quite follow the rules – he stopped when he got to 101 bands. I suppose he could have kept going. Also, I kind of get the sense that some of that list was just to make people that don’t live in cities that touring bands regularly visit a little jealous. The Decemberists, Jens Lekman and Lou Reed? I’m totes jealous.

After the jump, my list, in random order.

1. Sufjan Stevens

2. Camera Obscura

3. The Hold Steady

4. Belle and Sebastian

5. New Pornographers

6. Those Darlins

7. The Reigning Sound

8. Elvis Costello

9. Lucero

10. River City Tanlines

11. the Thermals

12. Okkervil River

13. Old 97s

14. They Might Be Giants

15. Ben Folds

16. My Brightest Diamond

17. Al Kapone

18. Arrah and the Ferns

19. Eef Barzelay

20. Everthus the Deadbeats

21. Snowglobe

22. Harlan T. Bobo

23. Chancho en Piedra

24. Two Way Radio

25. Lyle Lovett

26. Harry Conick Jr.

27. Boston Spaceships

28. Mr. Quintron and Miss Pussycat

29. Everything, Now!

30. Glue

31. Totally Michael

32. Rufus Thomas

33. Cory Branan

34. Jack O. and the Tennessee Tearjerkers

35. Stereofidelics

36. Holly Golightly and the Brokeoffs

37. Valerie June

38. This Story

And wow. I think that’s it. But that can’t be it – there’s no way. I live in Memphis, I’ve been to the HiTone more times than I care to remember. I can’t think of any other shows worth mentioning.

Compared to Bob Boilen, I’m an underachiever.

Even better is something I found thanks to Andy Carvin‘s Twitter feed: the Public Radio Tuner application developed by American Public Media: Over either WiFi or a 3G network, I can now stream public radio stations from around the nation.

 

What this means, most likely, is that if I get off work by nine in the evening, and it’s my post night, I still have about an hour to listen to “All Things Considered” in the car, if I pull up KCRW from Santa Monica, Calif. The time difference makes doing this blog much much easier.

(Or listen to “Morning Becomes Eclectic” on my lunch break. Whatever. It makes up for my burgeoning Tap Tap Revenge habit.)

Before this week’s “This American Life” podcast, Ira Gass comes on and talks about how the recession has hit public radio as well, and WBEZ has had to lay off some people. But, there’s something you can do - just give a few dollars (or more if you can afford it) so that they can keep providing the podcast for free.

You can also support your local stations by going to their sites on your way to Amazon.com. When you do this, they get a percentage of the sale. Memphis’s WKNO does that. It’s a great way to give without realizing it.

You can also buy things from the various stores on NPR, PRI, and individual show sites. Last year, I gave Matthew the awesome “What I Learned From Television” poster from the “This American Life” store.

We know the holidays are tough. We’re just asking that you please consider our dear friends who work to bring you awesome public programming, especially in this troubled economy. Too many people I like have had trouble, and if we can prevent it from happening even a little bit more, the world will be a better place.

NPR has more than 300 followers, and less than one update.

Talk of the Nation (they don’t update consistently, but they’re awesome when they do)

The Takeaway (Morning news show “for engaged listeners”)

Public Insight allows poses lots of questions (a lot of them from Marketplace).

We love WNYC, ’cause that’s where Brooke and Bob work.

BBC2 has very informed-sounding accents. (Granted, a lot of people who work in public radio have very informed-sounding accents. It’s almost like a job requirement).

Those of you with election addictions should hit up NPR Politics. They live-tweet election results and conventions! This is awesome if you don’t have cable.

Give some retroactive love to the BPP.

Consider all songs with Bob Boilen.

Laura Conaway and company are much cooler (and way less scary) than my college economics professor on planetmoney.

If you’re a public radio show with a Twitter account and we left you off the list, leave a comment and let us know. We’ll get you added right away.

 It’s very rare that bad puns in public radio headlines feel right to me.

It’s even rarer that they strike me as being perfectly reasonable; even fitting.It’s rarer still that I have kind words for “Marketplace.”

So it should go without mention that I kind of love the headline, “Army launches attack on fashion biz.” But that’s just too remarkable for me not to mention.

Also I like beating things into the ground, just for yuks. The story is pretty much what it sounds like: the Army finally figured out that people spend money at Army Surplus stores, and they wanted in. So they teamed up with storied purveyor of haute couture and sturdy tools, Sears.

The reporter says, with an understandable degree of incredulity creeping in at the edges of her voice, that Sears and the Army have the same target audience.

What’s next? The Air Force at Macy’s? NASA setting up at the Gap? (If there is any justice in the world, that second one will happen. Mark my words. Mark them “full of crap.”)

I have to wonder who the Army has in their sights with their precision-guided fashion bomb.

Moreover, I have to hold out hope that the line bombs as badly as my use of the ‘bomb’ pun. It’s as worn out after two uses as the last pair of jeans I bought from Sears.

Unlike 34,368 other Twitter users, we don’t follow @hotdogsladies; he seems far less inclined to shake the haters off than the fans, but once in a while, he’ll go on an insight spree.

This is pretty awesome, but we’re still not following.

Besides, it’s inaccurate. Robert Siegel doesn’t host All Things Considered on the weekend. Every other program he mentions is a weekend program.

Thus concludes the daily conformation of my innate nerdiness.

Anyway – this afternoon, I’m listening, and Mr. Ryssdal is ending a story on declining airline profits. He then transitions to the next story by saying “And the airlines aren’t the only business having trouble.”

To which, I shout “Newspapers!” gleefully.

This makes a bit of sense – I work at a newspaper, so I have a bit of vested interest in them.  But there’s more.

Quoth NPR correspondent Alisa Roth: “It’s taken years for the newspaper industry to realize that it’s no longer really in the newspaper business. It’s in the information business.”

My response? Yelling “INTERNET!!!!!!” very loudly. I’m an adult, alone in my car, yelling answers at the radio like I’m four and “Dora the Explorer” is on.

Sadly, the story didn’t get any less predictable. It can be summed up like this: newspapers are having a hard time adapting their business model to new media. They’ve tried lots of half-ways things, like putting PDFs of print editions on the internet and reforming the print product with hyper-local stories, but people aren’t going for it.

By the end of the story, I was yelling the last words in sentences like I’m a Beastie Boy. Thanks to the miracle of the internet, y’all can play along at home.

In other internet news, the Bryant Park Project launched their new Web site today, and it looks awesome.

Kerry’s friendly, too. She just has all the snark.

Sorry I’m, you know, boring.

If I am Morning Edition, she is The Bryant Park Project.
If she is Morning Becomes Eclectic, I am Performance Today.
If I am Weekend Edition, She is Weekend America.
If she is Fresh Air, I am Bookworm.
If I am The Thistle & Shamrock, she is American Routes.
If she is Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, I am Whad’ya Know?.

If I’m missing anything obvious, let me know how boring I am in the comments.